


Hand of Ragnaros

by voksen



Category: World of Warcraft
Genre: Community: bloodyvalentine, Gore, Hallucinations, Implied Incest, M/M, Mental Instability, Murder, No Sex, Other, Tentacles, Torture, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-25
Updated: 2013-01-25
Packaged: 2017-11-26 21:44:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,824
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/654715
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/voksen/pseuds/voksen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Qiraji were the first to discover that Staghelm's son was the chain around his throat; when Xavius took it up, the leash worked just as well for him; now, it will serve the Firelord.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hand of Ragnaros

Fandral had been tracking his son's faint trace through endless, mazy whorls for days, his sleeping body abandoned to whatever fate Tyrande willed. Perhaps they would shove it in some black cell and forget it for millenia; he didn't care. They might do what they wanted with it, with Teldrassil, with Hyjal, but he would _not_ let them snuff out his one last hope, not after everything else they had done, not after all his ruined work. This time, he would either bring Valstann back or die in the attempt and join him that way.

The Nightmare pressed in on every side, close and closer, the strange backward whispers that lurked in the shadow almost overwhelming him at times - but never quite. Fandral stumbled grimly onwards, following, always following, until the opaque mist suddenly broke before him and he half-tripped into a small, dimly-lit clearing.

"I have them," that so-familiar voice said, and just like that, there he was: so perfect, so real that Fandral could do nothing but stare.

" _Valstann_." For those first blessed moments, his eyes were only for his son - strategy, tactics, awareness as far from his mind as they had ever been. To see him again, to be so close.... He took another few bewitched steps forward before Valstann's words registered and he looked about.

Malfurion and Tyrande - their faces hidden by shadow and the curve of their bodies, but he could never mistake them - lay pinned to the earth behind his son, great twisting ropes of shadow looped about forearms, calves, waists. Tentacles that tightened and twitched when Fandral started back in surprise, moving like some strange extra limbs, like they were a part of _him_.

And they were, he realized: he felt Tyrande's soft skin, felt the ragged, torn edge of lace on her white dress; the hard plane of Malfurion's muscled arm and the odd join of feather and flesh. He flinched slightly at the sensations; the shadowy tentacles, responding, tensed and constricted. Malfurion's clawed paws jerked, but they were both strangely silent; when he went closer, slowly, warily, he saw that they were gagged with shadow, smoking, dripping, and yet solid. Tyrande's face was tight with anger - Malfurion's with shock.

It was obvious that neither of them felt the slightest fraction of guilt. Shameless treachery, he thought as the old pain welled up. He turned away from them deliberately, back to Valstann, who was still miraculously there, had not cruelly disappeared in the seconds Fandral's attention had wavered.

"I cannot judge them," Valstann said quietly, "But you are the Archdruid..." He held out empty hands, asking, _pleading._

Fandral had not been able to help him in Silithus or in Teldrassil, but there was nothing to stop him now - and in any case, criminals deserved punishment. He lifted Tyrande into the air as easily as if she were weightless, dangling her upside down. The skirt of her dress fell as he turned her, baring her long legs: stripping her dignity from her even as she had stolen his. She struggled furiously in his grasp, but the tentacles were impervious, their grip unbreakable. Even if she had had her mouth free to call on Elune, she would have been at his mercy.

He had none to spare. Valstann stood behind him, a solid presence at his back, a witness to judgment. "I thought for a long time you simply lacked wisdom despite your claims," he said, "that you were a fool, a fraud playing at priestess, a pretender." She kicked out uselessly again; he squeezed back until he felt bone snap beneath the shadow. She went suddenly still, eyes widening; if he ungagged her, she might scream. He did not.

"How long have you been a traitor?" he asked. "How long have you been working against me, against our people? Since the beginning? Did you sabotage the War of the Shifting Sands as you did the fight against the Horde? _Did you?_ "

She of course could not answer, but it didn't matter; he didn't need to hear a confession. He saw clearly how it would have happened, how the two of them could have kept troops from Southwind, left it vulnerable - just as they had betrayed Ashenvale -

Fandral broke her other leg without meaning to; only a tiny movement from Valstann, a reminder of his presence, stopped him from simply crushing her. He would kill her, he knew - he _must_ \- but not like this: not a murder, not out of blind rage, and there was only one way that would suit.

"For the deaths you've caused," he said as Valstann came still closer, almost touching him now, sending prickles over Fandral's skin and standing his hair on end, "for the progress you halted, for your treachery, for your crimes against the people, you will die."

She struggled again, but this time he let her, drew her up higher, higher, still dangling by her shattered legs. He had seen this every moment of every day, waking and sleeping and Dreaming, for the last thousand years: he knew precisely how her skin would tear, her joints crack and pop until bone and flesh finally gave way with a shattering pulpy crunch and sent blood splashing down in thick red waves.

He released the tentacles on her arms and waist. Hands freed, she immediately tried to claw the gag from her mouth, the remaining tentacles from her legs. But jackknifing like that jarred her legs badly enough to send a spike of shattered bone out through the skin of her calf; she collapsed again from the shock, hanging briefly limp from his grip. In that instant of weakness, he pulled - not slowly, but a short, sharp jerk, a mirror of the Qiraji's ancient brutality.

Her body ripped just as easily as he had known it would into two ragged, unequal halves: most of her head on the right, only a strip of neck-and-scalp clinging to the left. From so close, the details were still more vivid than his memory: the bits of shredded flesh that flew in either direction, spattering Malfurion - and Fandral - with a fine spray of blood, the slither of intestines, freed from their casing, falling out in tangled loops that did not quite touch the ground, the brief, soon-stilled flutter of naked heart and lungs. Rajaxx must have seen Valstann like this, then, this beautiful, intimate exposure; must have felt the mist of blood pooling on his cursed carapace even as it now ran down Fandral's own unclothed chest, trickling in slow rivulets towards his hips. He must have known him in a way no other ever had or ever could.

Fandral dropped the pieces _(the distant muffled thud as Valstann's body hit the dry silithyst)_ and the shadow of the Nightmare reclaimed them quickly, dragging the whole mess down into the darkness below. It left him hollow, alone, jealous, lost in the blood of the past.

Valstann's lips were like a brand on the nape of his neck, searing skin and pressing deeper. "You were the hand of earth," he said, his voice deep and crackling, and Fandral closed his eyes briefly to listen; the sound alone warmed him, drove out the fel chill of the empty darkness around them. "And the hand of shadow. Will you be the hand of flame?"

"Will you come back to me?" Fandral asked in return. It was all he wanted, all he had ever wanted - the only thing he had lived for these thousand years.

"Of course."

Heat poured from him in pulsing waves, enough to drown in, _living_ heat. This was no shade of the Dream, no fragment of Nightmare. "Valstann," he murmured, his son's name half a prayer, half an oath. "Yes. Anything."

"Then you must finish it," Valstann said. "Let fire purge the impurities and burn away the weeds."

When Fandral looked back, Malfurion was struggling against the tentacles that bound him - _now_ he fought, Fandral seethed, anger flaring sharply, razor-edged inside of him. Now that it was too late for him, for all of them, Malfurion had finally found the will to fight. "You should have stayed sleeping, _shan'do,_ " he said, his voice cracking under the consuming hatred. "But you would have betrayed us anyway, in the end - even if she hadn't woken you too soon."

"He killed my little girl," Valstann whispered behind him. His arms slipped around Fandral's waist, his head resting against his father's broad, bare shoulder - hot, so hot as he rocked against him, pressed close, like he was burning up with fever.

"For crimes against the Kal'dorei," Fandral repeated, and opened his heart to the fire.

The shadowy tentacles curling around Malfurion's limbs flared bright, casting off their dark husks as they were reborn in flame and dripping lava - as _Fandral_ was reborn. Where they touched him, they crisped skin, charred flesh, melted the thin layer of fat beneath in long, precise spiraling stripes - Fandral could feel them still, as if he were burning Malfurion with the stroke of his own hands. The rich savory smell of roast meat filled the air; the sizzle and stench of scorched hair.

The gag finally was no match for the sounds Malfurion made as Fandral first burned away his wings, then tore off his stag's horns and cauterized the gory stumps with a hard press of fire lest he bleed out too soon. Behind him, Valstann whispered encouragement, promises, love; Fandral's strength grew with every word and every touch. He dipped the whiplike points of his tentacles into golden eyes and boiled them to dark shriveled pits, shredded tattered remnants of clothes and armor from the writhing body in a whirl of ash and cinders to leave him bare and vulnerable before them. His _shan'do_ had failed him. Cenarius had failed him. He would have his son back at last, at long last, but first he would have justice. He would see Malfurion _unmade_.

It was not a quick death.

 

When Fandral woke, he was underground, lying cradled in the coiled embrace of a great green dragon, her overheated scales pressed tight against his back. He remembered being led through the Nightmare and coming out into the light; he remembered her catching him on the other side. He remembered... yes. When he called her name, she shuddered under him, moaned feebly. The heat and sulfur were clearly too much for her as she was, forsworn of the Dream or not.

But despite the smoke thick in the air, his own voice was smooth, his throat whole. This was real. His son was real, and he would burn the world so Valstann could rise from its ash. But Alysra deserved more than to choke out her life here for what she had done; deserved to survive into the new order in a form more suited for it. A firebird, he thought, for rebirth - then set his hand on her broad shoulder and called the Flame.


End file.
